America Disarmed
Inside the U.N. and Obama’s Scheme to Destroy the Second Amendment
Wayne LaPierre
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011
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Contents
Foreword - By Chris W. Cox, National Rifle Association
Introduction - The U.N. Gun Ban Treaty
Chapter 1 - Global Repression: The International Gun Control Movement
Chapter 2 - The U.N.’s Disarmament Agenda: Looking Back, Looking Forward
Chapter 3 - CIFTA, the U.N. Antigun Conferences, and the Arms Trade Treaty
Chapter 4 - Demonizing Lawful Gun Owners
Chapter 5 - Choking Off the Second Amendment in the United States
Chapter 6 - Congress and the Second Amendment: Views of the Popular Branch
Chapter 7 - U.N. Gun Prohibition: One Country at a Time
Chapter 9 - Peacekeepers, Rapists, and Gunrunners
Chapter 10 - United Nations Corruption
Chapter 11 - United Nations and Genocide: A Historical Perspective
Chapter 12 - More Gun Control for Genocide Victims
Chapter 13 - The “Table for Tyrants”: The U.N. vs. Human Rights
Chapter 14 - The U.N. and Terrorism: A Blood and Money Trail
Chapter 15 - The U.N., the Internet, and a Free Press
Chapter 16 - Don’t Trust Direct Democracy
Chapter 17 - Barack Obama: The Most Antigun President in American History
Chapter 20 - Obama Appointments
This book would never have seen its way into print if not for the expertise and kind assistance of two of my longtime colleagues. Sincere thanks go to David B. Kopel, research director at the Independence Institute, and to noted constitutional law expert Stephen P. Halbrook. In sections of this work, you will see their exhaustive research and insights unfold, since their findings are so powerful as to demand inclusion along with my own firsthand observations. Both men serve every day as freedom fighters on the front lines in the battle to defend the Second Amendment, and I am proud to call them friends.
In 2009, the United States joined 152 other countries in endorsing the United Nations Small Arms Treaty, a resolution designed to disarm America and others across the globe.
Specifically, the resolution establishes an international conference to be held in 2012, where leaders from various countries—many of which have deplorable human rights records—will craft an international scheme to severely restrict our right to own a firearm.
As Professor Larry Bell detailed in a popular column for Forbes magazine in early 2011, this global agreement will surely pave the way for gun bans, mandatory gun registration, and eventually, the confiscation of civilian-owned firearms. President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the U.N. all claim that the only purpose of the treaty is to fight terrorism and international crime syndicates. Americans should not be fooled.
According to Professor Bell, should the U.S. Senate ratify the treaty it will almost certainly force America to:
enact firearms licensing requirements, creating additional bureaucratic red tape for legal firearms ownership;
confiscate and destroy all “unauthorized” civilian firearms;
ban the trade, sale, and private ownership of all semiautomatic firearms; and
create an international gun registry.
Bell also notes that the treaty will override our national sovereignty and, in the process, give license to the federal government to assert preemptive powers over state regulatory powers guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment.
You can see why gun control activists in the United States have been lobbying for this treaty for a long time.
Former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, the preeminent expert on the inner workings of the global body, recently told me there is no doubt that the U.N.’s real agenda here is domestic firearms control:
“After the treaty is approved and it comes into force, you will find out that it has this implication or that implication and it requires the Congress to adopt some measure that restricts ownership of firearms,” Bolton warns. “The [Obama] administration knows it cannot obtain this kind of legislation purely in a domestic context…They will use an international agreement as an excuse to get domestically what they couldn’t otherwise.”
The NRA has been warning America’s gun owners about this ticking time bomb for nearly two decades and has committed serious resources to fighting the U.N. and President Obama’s global gun ban schemes.
Hillary Clinton has not been shy about her determination to push for Senate ratification of the U.N.’s gun ban treaty. And you can bet that if Obama wins a second term, he’ll move full speed ahead to implement the U.N. treaty’s mandates. Popular or not, it won’t matter, because Obama won’t need to appeal to voters for reelection. Ironically, the U.N.’s gun ban treaty will make citizens of the United States and other countries more vulnerable to terror, not less.
Historic and current events show us that rogue governments, not private citizens, pose the greatest threat to innocent civilians across the globe. This horrible truth is visible every day in Africa. The mass murders that tyrants carry out are made possible by the confiscation of privately owned firearms—and firearm confiscation is made possible by the licensing and registration of gun owners, firearms, and ammunition.
According to political scientist, noted author, and international conflict expert Rudy Rummel, the fifteen worst regimes during the twentieth century killed 151 million of their own citizens. That comes to 1.5 million victims per year. For many unfortunate people around the world, government poses a much a larger threat than the guy next door.
Of course, President Obama and Secretary Clinton have never bothered themselves with the facts surrounding firearms ownership. They have spent their entire careers demonizing American gun owners and doing everything in their power to make gun ownership more expensive, more difficult, and, in many cases, illegal.
Now they want to unleash the entire U.N. gun-ban axis on our right to keep and bear arms.
NRA’s chief executive officer and executive vice president Wayne LaPierre does an excellent job blowing the lid off this backdoor scheme to use the United Nations to force mandatory gun registration and confiscation on America.
The pages herein will show you exactly what Obama means when he says he is working for gun control “under the radar.” And it’s my hope that after reading this you will help NRA sound the alarm on this treacherous abdication of U.S. sovereignty.
Chris W. Cox, Executive Director
National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action
The U.N. Gun Ban Treaty
It was 1996, in the dark days of the Clinton administration, when I first began to sound the alarm to the unsuspecting gun owners of our nation. The gun-ban lobby, having been forced to a standstill in Congress, was looking for new avenues on which to attack our Second Amendment rights. At the same time, the vast apparatus of the United Nations and its associated nongovernmental organizations was fresh off a global campaign to ban land mines and looking for a new rallying cry. It was 1997 when a U.N. panel of “government experts on small arms” delivered a formal recommendation for a global conference to be held in the near future. The goal? A global treaty to restrict “small arms and light weapons.”
The U.N. had plunged headlong into the gun-ban business.
Upping the ante in 1999, the U.N. issued another demand for a small-arms conference to be held in 2001. They were making a high-stakes bet on the outcome of the 2000 presidential election. They were counting on Al Gore to not only take the Oval Office, but also to encourage the creation of the global gun-ban manifesto as the next step of the relentless Clinton-Gore drive to destroy our Second Amendment rights. So, the conference was slated for July 2001, to make sure the newly elected Gore would have enough time to install the antigun lobby’s operatives into key positions with authority over America’s negotiating positions. Self-appointed social engineers all over the world were silently cheering for the Gore campaign, and the major funders of the global gun-ban movement poured their resources into shadowy political operations intended to ensure a Gore victory.
The plan was simple, and the bets were laid. But the silk-stocking set forgot to account for a single, major political force that would come to play a pivotal role in the presidential election—the National Rifle Association, and more important, its base of grassroots supporters.
NRA president Charlton Heston and I went on the road for weeks leading up the presidential election. In every city we visited, our message was simple: our gun rights could not survive another four years of Clinton-Gore assaults. We took our message to the heartland and to the battleground states. Just before the elections, we held our last rallies in Tennessee and Arkansas— to make sure that the voters who had first elected Clinton and Gore would know exactly how far their favored sons had strayed from their home states’ political values. At every venue, capacity crowds jammed shoulder to shoulder to hear our message and to join our battle cry in unison—to “Vote Freedom First” and elect George W. Bush to the U.S. presidency.
The outcome is now well charted in history. During the agonizing weeks spent on the Florida recounts, analysts were musing over results that indicated vast departures from past voting history. Against all odds and predictions, George W. Bush carried Arkansas, Tennessee, and three other states that Bill Clinton himself credited the NRA with helping President Bush win.1 Once the Supreme Court put an end to the partisanship in Florida, the victor was declared.
We were all exhausted for weeks. It had taken every penny we could muster to pay for the advertising, direct mail, phone banks, and political rallies. It had taken every ounce of personal energy to keep up the breakneck pace of weeks of political rallies, some of them held in three different cities per day. And it had taken every last vote we could summon from the nation’s sportsmen and -women to Vote Freedom First, defeat Al Gore, and protect our rights from another four years of withering assault in the nation’s capital.
But the U.N. was another story entirely.
It was too late for the U.N. puppet masters to beat a strategic retreat. The plan for the gun-ban conference and treaty continued right on pace.
The global gun-ban forces planned to avenge their defeated champion, Al Gore. They knew that the Bush administration would not let them run roughshod over the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of American citizens, so they were going to turn the event into a media circus.
And then they made another bet. The demands issuing from the conference would include another conference in 2006, for another bite of the apple after the 2004 presidential elections. And here we were about to witness the U.N.’s second concerted effort to strip the Second Amendment from our Constitution. This time, however, we didn’t have to worry about the drafting of a wide-ranging treaty to demand that our rights be sacrificed on the altar of global political correctness.
Because this time, the treaty was already in place. It had been for five years.
In July 2001, the conference stage was set, and I traveled to New York City just to observe the spectacle. The official title of the meeting was “United Nations Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects”—not the first or last time the U.N. crowd would demonstrate its passion for long, ambiguous phrases to describe the proceedings.
You see, there really are no definitions at the U.N. Specific meanings for terms of discussion would force the diplomats to abandon their rambling rhetoric. Diplomacy as practiced at the U.N. includes intentional vagueness, apparently intended to spare the diplomats from being forced to make concrete decisions over agreed-upon terms. Often, there are no definitions, and no votes. The only progress made by the body as a whole would come in the celebrated process of “consensus.” Consensus, to my observation, meant wearing down your opponents with media ambushes and other confrontations designed purely to reduce resistance.
But it was immediately clear to me what the terms “small arms and light weapons” meant to the U.N. delegates. As I climbed the steps to the
U.N. building on that morning, I came across the most prominent statue on the plaza. It shows a revolver with its barrel twisted into a knot. And when I stepped in the doors, I saw another special piece of “artwork” commissioned specifically for the conference. It consisted of more than seven thousand rifles, pistols, and shotguns, crushed into the shape of a cube. From overhead a single light shone, “epitomizing hope for change in the future.” Other themed artworks designed to inspire the conference included murals titled Guns ’R Us and the Mural of Pain, the latter showing photos and drawings of “victims of gun violence.”
There were no pictures of mortars, shoulder-fired rockets, heavy crew-served machine guns, or anything else you and I might consider to be “small arms and light weapons.” There was no criticism of rogue military forces or genocidal governments. The conference and its artwork focused only on the “scourge of small arms” and the “flood of weaponry,” with all fingers pointed to the United States and our “lax gun laws” as their source.
No, the target of the conference was revolvers, pistols, shotguns, and rifles. Your guns. And your rights.
The day before the conference opened, the spectacle was fully under way. And what a show! Remember, the staff and diplomats at the U.N. are outnumbered manyfold by the representatives of nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs. Thousands of these groups are accredited at the U.N. and make a full-time living from pressing their demands before the body. The largest and most influential NGOs serve as puppeteers for delegates who support their extremist agendas. With supreme arrogance, the NGOs refer to themselves and their pet delegates at the U.N. as “civil society.”
Media grandstanding is part and parcel of their program. Even before the conference was officially under way, supporters took to the streets with giant protest puppets, most depicting the newly elected President Bush in a less-than-flattering light. The U.N. itself made its plaza available for a daylong series of speeches, exhibits, displays, posters, and video-loop “documentaries.” The crowning touch was a page from the U.S. antigun lobby playbook, the so-called Silent March, where thousands of shoes were arranged on a red carpet. There were candles and incense, singing, and much holding of hands.
It had all the hallmarks of protest marches in the nation’s capital, complete with hundreds of NGO activists, except here the protesters were also the professionals. The next day, they would move into the U.N. building in force, and play a major role in the outcome of the negotiations.
Let’s talk about what happens during a U.N. conference. Most folks probably envision the typical TV shot of a U.N. chamber, with delegates plugged into headphones offering translation to their native tongue. This scene did play out during the conference, but it is only the smallest part of the proceedings.
The bulk of the theater takes place outside the U.N. building, with staged events and media productions built around themes assigned to different days of discussion. The first day of the gun-ban conference was called “Small Arms Destruction Day,” complete with a U.N.-issued handbook “to aid those in charge of such destruction.” Countries around the world were encouraged to destroy “confiscated, collected, seized, or surplus” firearms and to invite the local media for maximum exposure.
Other themes to play out during the conference included “Children’s Day” and “Women’s Day,” as well as Africa, Asia, and Latin America Days. And the U.N. helpfully published a daily Disarmament Times newspaper to help keep activists up to speed on the day’s events. A total of 119 NGOs attended the conference, dispatching 380 representatives. Some of those NGOs were umbrella groups, such as the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), which in turn includes hundreds of other NGOs. That made for plenty of street theater during the conference.
Back in the U.N. headquarters building, the discussions proceeded at several levels. The only visible evidence of the conference came in the form of regular speeches offered by delegates of participating countries. These vague, rambling lectures touched on various issues within the negotiations, occasionally offering a nation’s perspective but still couched in blurred, equivocal rhetoric that seemed essentially meaningless. The U.N. also allowed the NGOs to make their own presentations to the delegates, a process that reminded me of the frequent sight on Capitol Hill of a lone Congressman speaking to an empty chamber.
The real action went on in dozens of conference rooms deep in the bowels of the building. That’s where hundreds of staff-level negotiators from the major participating nations hammered out specific language to propose to their country’s delegates upstairs. The United States had representatives present from its headquarters U.N. staff, the Department of State, the Department of Defense, and dozens of smaller agencies. But it’s impossible to know what’s going on in these discussions, as they are closed to the public and to NGOs as well. In fact, the entire two final days of the conference were conducted in closed session, when the major nations finally began to negotiate in earnest over the final document.
It struck me as more than mildly ironic that the U.N., an institution purportedly striving for democracy and representative government all over the globe, would conduct its business behind an unyielding facade of official silence. Where was the outrage? My professional lifetime has been devoted to affecting the policy decisions of elected lawmakers. In the fifty state legislatures and U.S. Congress, not even our fiercest enemies ever tried to deprive us of the opportunity to witness debate and affect the outcome of votes. Here, there would be no voting. There would be no opportunity to witness the real debate over the provisions of the treaty. And there was certainly no way to lobby the delegates for or against anything in particular, if by chance you could find out what was really under discussion behind closed doors.
The process needed a central focus, a starting point from which to draw our battle lines. And that’s when Undersecretary of State John Bolton showed up.
Undersecretary Bolton was then fairly new to the job. Appointed by President George W. Bush, Bolton had a reputation as a hard-liner in foreign policy, one that was well deserved. Bolton was once asked, under questioning from a Congressman, to explain his approach to negotiating foreign policy with other nations. The Congressman suggested to Bolton that perhaps a carrot-and-stick approach would be more fruitful. Bolton cut him off, saying curtly, “I don’t do carrots.”
But he brought his stick to the U.N., appearing before the delegates on July 9, 2001. He began his address with the typical flourishes of the U.N. idiom, addressing the audience as “Excellencies and distinguished colleagues . . .” But the niceties stopped there, and Bolton went directly to the heart of the matter, first attempting to force some definitions into the process.
“Small arms and light weapons, in our understanding, are the strictly military arms—automatic rifles, machine guns, shoulder-fired missile and rocket systems, light mortars,” he said. “We separate these military arms from firearms such as hunting rifles and pistols, which are commonly owned and used by citizens in many countries.”
Bolton went on: “As U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft has said, ‘just as the First and Fourth Amendments secure individual rights of speech and security respectively, the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms.’ We therefore do not begin with the presumption that all small arms and light weapons are the same, or that they are problematic.”
Bolton then outlined the United States’ opposition to many of the treaty’s proposed elements, saying, “We do not support measures that would constrain legal trade and legal manufacturing of small arms and light weapons . . . We do not support the promotion of international advocacy activity by international or non-governmental organizations, particularly when those political or policy views advocated are not consistent with the views of all member states . . . We do not support measures that prohibit the civilian possession of small arms, [and] the United States will not join consensus on a final document that contains measures contrary to our Constitutional right to bear arms.”
He closed by calling the opposition’s bet on a 2006 conference, saying, “The United States also will not support a mandatory Review Conference, which serves only to institutionalize and bureaucratize this process . . . Neither will we commit to begin negotiations and reach agreement on any legally binding instruments, the feasibility and necessity of which may be in question and in need of review over time.”2
Timid applause greeted the end of his remarks, but many of the delegates were silently fuming. Bolton had just slammed the door on U.S. participation in the holy grail of the conference—a legally binding global treaty, designed and intended to restrict the rights of American citizens. But again, the U.N. would not be so easily defeated. The forces behind the gun-ban treaty retreated overnight to recalculate their strategy. By the next morning, their tactic was clear: proceed under the framework established by Bolton’s comments, continue negotiations over treaty language considered “politically binding” but not legally binding, and wear down the United States until it surrendered.
Bolton returned to D.C. but left behind his enormous team of negotiators from the various U.S. agencies. The United States also appointed three “public” members of the official delegation, all of whom understood the political implications of the proposed treaty: Congressman Bob Barr of Georgia, former Congressman Chip Pashayan of California, and former U.S. ambassador to Switzerland Faith Whittlesey.
Still, the next ten days played out as David and Goliath, with the United States alone in the position of fighting off the biased media, antigun delegations from countries such as Japan and Canada, and the relentless fervor of the hundreds of antigun NGOs represented at the conference.
Other nations that opposed elements of the treaty were content to sit back and let the United States take the heat, knowing from Bolton’s speech that the U.S. position was firm, and that they wouldn’t have to get their own hands dirty. The central talking point of the global gun-ban elite was to claim that the United States had isolated itself against a global consensus to restrict firearms in a U.N. treaty. On Main Street, USA, this is a claim to glory. But in the hallways of the U.N. building, isolation was considered a major offense against the very concept of the U.N. itself.
Chip Pashayan later told NewsMax.com, “It was magnificent to see the U.S. stand up against these forces and not buckle under to what was international political pressure, which was very formidable notwithstanding the fact that the U.S. is the big boy on the block.”3
Second Amendment scholar David Kopel, who monitored the discussions, later wrote in National Review:
The U.S. delegation consistently rejected efforts at “compromise,” which would have kept some antigun language in the treaty but made it softer and more ambiguous. An American delegation that was terrified of being “isolated” would have accepted the ambiguous language—on the theory that the Americans could later apply a pro-rights interpretation to the ambiguities. The Bush delegation was wiser: It recognized that, at the U.N., a conference final document is just the starting point. From there, U.N. bureaucrats will “monitor” how a country “complies” with such documents, and the bureaucrats resolving the ambiguities will favor their own radical agendas.”4
The antigun delegates were befuddled. In the past, they had successfully worked together to wear down the United States in negotiating the specifics of other treaties. The U.S. negotiators were conditioned to moving their positions incrementally in the process, and checking back frequently with their bosses in Washington to see what they could live with. In his NewsMax interview, Pashayan noted, “The people from the State Department would have been more inclined to compromise to produce an agreement, that’s their business. But they were prepared to follow the directions coming from above to stick with the ‘redlines’ and not go along with watered-down language.”5
Going completely against the consensus process, Bolton’s speech had drawn a line in the sand. The United States team had no intention of allowing that line to be crossed, despite the relentless and growing pressure.
The standoff would last beyond the scheduled closing of the conference, forcing negotiators to go into an all-night bargaining session on the final night.
Delegates were huddled in Conference Room 4 of the U.N. General Assembly building. It was Friday, July 20—slated as the final day of the conference. Tense negotiations had gone on late into the night on Thursday. The major bones of contention had boiled down to two of the “redlines” established in Bolton’s speech.
The U.S. team refused to budge on language to prohibit small arms exports to “non-state actors,” an artful term coined by the diplomatic set to describe anyone who was not an official government recognized by the U.N. The American team rightly refused this language outright, noting that it would prohibit support for freedom fighters, people resisting tyrannical governments (such as our colonial minutemen at Lexington and Concord) or even longtime allies like Taiwan that are not formally recognized by the U.N. as a state.
The other redline was drawn over language to “seriously consider legal restrictions on unrestricted trade in and ownership of small arms and light weapons.” In the alarmingly vague U.N. vernacular, this language amounted to a direct attack on the civilian ownership of firearms of any kind.
Some African delegations were insisting on the “non-state actor” language, due in no small part to their desire to solidify and consolidate power behind their current dictatorial governments, and strip opposition forces of the means to challenge their power.
Antigun delegates moved to preserve some shred of the language prohibiting civilian ownership. Conference president Camillo Reyes of Colombia attempted to mediate, proposing a compromise in which the language would be moved to the preamble of the document, where it would be perceived as having less force. At every impasse, Reyes complained about the Americans’ stubborn refusal to entertain compromise, and ordered the conference to finish debate over some other, unresolved language irrelevant to the core negotiations.
It was by then Saturday morning, about 4 a.m., and the core dispute could be avoided no longer. Canadian negotiators introduced another watered-down version of the “non-state actor” language, which would say only that a nation “has to bear special responsibility when it would send arms to non-state actors.” Canada dangled a package deal; if the U.S. would accept this vague statement, it would agree to deletion of the language on civilian ownership. Negotiators fell into silence as they realized that Canada had decided to push the United States to the edge of the envelope.
We said no.
Reyes again criticized the United States and ordered a break. Pashayan told NewsMax that some exhausted members of the negotiating team wanted to accept the Canadian compromise, although it, too, could hamper a future president in foreign policy. Drawing on more than a decade’s experience as a Congressman, Pashayan counseled a steady hand, suggesting that the simply refuse the deal and see what happened next.
Pashayan’s counsel was correct. When the conference reconvened, the African nations dropped their demands. Following their lead, the developed nations opposing the U.S. position said they would follow the Africans’ lead. As the sun rose over Manhattan, the final document was readied for consideration while the negotiators got a few hours’ sleep.
The document was consolidated into a single draft and headed with the title “Programme of Action.” It would be considered “politically binding,” meaning that it lacked legal authority but nonetheless represented the consensus of participating nations. It did not violate any of the Americans’ stated redlines, at least not technically, and it allowed the opposition to salvage some “face” for the time and effort spent on negotiations. In sum, it was the perfect political deal—no one was particularly happy with it, it meant essentially nothing in terms of binding law, but it nonetheless allowed everyone involved to say they had “done something” about the problem, whether real or imagined.
U.S. negotiators were not pleased, however, that the final draft still contained a call for a follow-up conference in 2006. But it was too late for more discussions. Reyes quickly brought the final document up for consideration, and pronounced it passed by consensus. The delegates then proceeded to deliver a lengthy series of speeches congratulating Reyes for garnering approval, but expressing disappointment that the Americans had prevailed in negotiations.
Pashayan summed up the experience for NewsMax: “This is not the end. This is the beginning skirmish of a war . . . All of this has to be understood as part of a process leading ultimately to a treaty that will give an international body power over our domestic laws. That is why we must make sure that there is nothing, express or implied, that would give even the appearance of infringing on our Bill of Rights, which includes the Second Amendment.”6
Not surprisingly, the Programme of Action has had no effect on containing or preventing global conflict. So the next natural step is to accuse nations of noncompliance, demand far more restrictive language, and insist that the next conference produce a document that is legally binding. Translation: All fingers pointed at America, and all of their demands once again focused on your gun collection.
If no changes are made in the Programme of Action, what impact could the existing document have on our rights?
The answer is: plenty. The language is vague and sweeping, and it doesn’t take much imagination to see how the gun-ban crowd could insist on the most extreme reading of its elements. Here’s a rundown of the major existing provisions agreed to by consensus in 2001, quoted directly from the document.7
To put in place, where they do not exist, adequate laws, regulations and administrative procedures to exercise effective control over the production of SALW (small arms and light weapons) within their areas of jurisdiction, and over the export, import, transit or retransfer of such weapons.
Read it again, and remember: there is no definition of “small arms and light weapons.” Not to mention “adequate laws,” “effective control,” and “transit or retransfer.” Who decides what is adequate? Who defines “effective control”? I do know the meanings of transit and retransfer, and these terms encompass merely traveling with firearms, or giving or selling firearms to friends, family, or at a gun show.
Ensure that comprehensive and accurate records are kept for as long as possible on the manufacture, holding and transfer of SALW.
“Comprehensive and accurate records, kept as long as possible.” The United States already does that for the manufacturing of firearms, but “holding and transfer” means possession and purchase. Taken in sum, this provision is code for a massive, international gun registration database, a deep pond for unlimited fishing expeditions by U.N. bureaucrats and investigators.
Develop adequate national legislation or administrative procedures regulating the activities of those who engage in SALW brokering.
What is a gun dealer if not a broker between the manufacturer and customer? And here again, what exactly is “adequate”? As the U.S. team realized during negotiations, the answers to these questions will come not from a dictionary or neutral party, but from U.N. bureaucrats who are already on record opposing our constitutional freedoms.
Ensure confiscated, seized or collected SALW are destroyed.
Any Americans who aren’t worried about firearms being confiscated have their heads in the sand. In 2005 we saw authorities going house to house in New Orleans after the Hurricane Katrina disaster, pounding on doors and illegally confiscating firearms. The National Rifle Association stopped them in court, and the judge ordered the confiscated guns returned, but if the U.N. has its way, there would be nothing to return but scraps of metal and heaps of ashes.
Develop and implement, where possible, effective disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration programmes.
So after we are disarmed, the U.N. wants us demobilized and reintegrated. I can hear it now: “Step right this way for your reprogramming, sir. Once we confiscate your guns, we can demobilize your aggressive instincts and reintegrate you into civil society.”
No thanks.
Encourage regional negotiations with the aim of concluding relevant legally binding instruments aimed at preventing, combating and eradicating the illicit trade, and where they do exist to ratify and fully implement them.
The antigun forces are encouraging countries to use other multinational groups, such as the Organization of American States, the European Union, and various African regional groups, to negotiate stricter treaties, make them binding, and push them through to ratification. It’s intended to open up other fronts of attack, and it has been successful, as you will learn.
Encourage the strengthening of moratoria or similar initiatives in affected regions or subregions on the transfer and manufacture of SALW.
This one is simple. “Moratoria” is the plural of moratorium, a fancy word for “ban.”
Finally, the real whopper:
Promote a dialogue and a culture of peace by encouraging education and public awareness programmes on the problems of the illicit trade in SALW.
Let’s connect the dots here. “SALW” means our guns. “Illicit trade,” to many U.N. delegates, means any civilian trade whatsoever. So the “culture of peace” means no guns in civilian hands—a monopoly of force held by the state.
We don’t need a dialogue about that concept; our Founding Fathers had a vigorous dialogue when they crafted the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution. They expressly rejected a monopoly of force held by the state, and for good reason. But if the U.N. has its way, our cherished constitutional freedoms will be obliterated to reach the naive fantasy of a “culture of peace.”
I can hear some readers now: “Oh, Wayne’s just overreacting. That’s not what these people really want.” It is. And you don’t have to take my word for it.
In 2004, I traveled to London to publicly debate Rebecca Peters, head of the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA). She was the chief of an umbrella group of NGOs, hundreds of them, who are all working together toward a global gun ban. Debating before an audience at King’s College, I was amazed at how openly Ms. Peters was willing to admit the long-term goals of their movement.8
Peters quoted U.N. head Kofi Annan as saying, “The easy availability of small arms has contributed to violence and political insecurity, and have [sic] imperiled human security in every way.” She told the audience that “guns are involved in human rights abuses . . . guns obstruct peacekeeping activities . . . guns hinder development, investment, and tourism.”
That’s a long indictment! But she was just getting started.
“Guns don’t respect borders,” she continued, citing the same argument of our national gun-ban groups when they complain about “lax” gun laws in our rural states causing crime in major cities. “There is a patchwork of laws globally,” she said, echoing another canard of our domestic debate. And she grabbed one last arrow from the rhetorical quiver of the U.S. gun-ban lobby, claiming that increased crime rates in Great Britain were due not to their gun bans, but to the “loophole” of failing to ban airguns and replicas. And then she told the group that the Programme of Action represented only “moderate measures” to “reform” gun laws globally. She stated that the U.N.’s efforts to pass a gun-ban treaty represented “civil society saying, ‘Stop!’” to the United States.
It became clear that in Peters’s view, our guns were equivalent to military ordnance and weapons of mass destruction. “Treaties are how we deal with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons,” she said. “Only guns are exempt.” She vented her wrath on the United States, saying, “The U.S. should recognize it’s not exempt from the world, contributes disproportionately to world problems, and should cooperate.”
An audience member pointed out that the U.S. Constitution prevented her vision of “cooperation” with the gun-ban treaty, but she persisted, complaining that the U.S. position represented the attitude that American citizens are “more equal than others.”
Peters detailed the starting point of the “moderate reforms” she wanted the U.N. to ram down the throat of America’s law-abiding citizens: owner licensing, registration, certain categories of guns should not be available, and limits on the number of guns civilians can own. Her goal, she claimed, was to “keep guns out of the hands of people who are irresponsible.” When asked who that might be, she shrugged, saying that “good people sometimes do bad things” and that lawful self-defense “only happens in the movies.”
I told the audience that if Peters and the U.N. couldn’t tell the bad people from the good, we were all going to be in a lot of trouble. The audience pressed Peters for more detail on what type of firearms Americans should be allowed to own.
Peters responded, “I think American citizens shouldn’t be exempt from the rules that apply to the rest of the world . . . Americans should have only guns suitable for purposes they can prove.”
An audience member told Peters that his target-shooting guns had been confiscated, and asked if this disturbed her in any way. She responded, “Countries change; laws change; why are firearms exempt? The definition of sporting activity is always under pressure. Target shooting is not a legitimate sport! If you miss your sport, take up another!”
Now the audience was riled, and Peters was flustered when she delivered her closing remarks, saying: “Guns cause enormous suffering in the world at large. So much for guns and freedom. The U.S. is the country with the largest proportion of its population in prison . . . We should be talking about prevention. People have a right to live free from fear. Wayne has been watching too many movies. Common sense dictates that guns do not make people or societies safer.”
The audience had grown skeptical, and I tried to put her words in a larger perspective. I told the crowd that we saw the IANSA mission for what it was: the reemergence of the same old socialist fantasies of the twentieth century—fantasies that prey on citizens who fall for the false promise of social engineering. I described the global gun-ban forces as elitists who think they know better than we do how to live our lives, spend our money, educate our children, and protect our homes. They are people who believe that if they could just be in charge, they could make our lives perfect. Their basic premise now is that if you will surrender your right to own a firearm to the whims of a new global bureaucracy, you will be safe. But I counseled the audience to study the history of nations where the social engineers have had their way, and suggested they should think twice about the bargain.
Americans simply won’t fall for it, I explained. We are the freest nation in the world, and the false promise of the social engineers is precisely the bargain rejected by our forefathers.
I explained why Peters’s vision was so frightening to Americans. Her vision is sweeping international police powers, offensive to every notion of our Bill of Rights. I told the audience to look at her own words, papers, and testimony, and they would find endless demands for recordkeeping, oversight, inspections, supervision, tracking, tracing, surveillance, marking, verification, paper trails, and databases.
And I pointed out that—no matter what Peters’s lofty words and noble rhetoric were—nowhere in her documents would you find any provision by which oppressed people would be liberated or freed from dictatorship. Nowhere in her work is there a thought about respecting the rights to self-defense, privacy, property, due process, or political freedom of any kind.
I closed by asking the audience to join the fight for freedom—because these competing visions will now clash again on the debate floors of the U.N. in New York City.
The U.N. conference is not the only battlefield; it’s just the largest. The global gun-ban forces have spent the years since the first conference opening new fronts for the clash of competing visions, and each one poses a unique threat to our freedoms. Each is also intended to add to the growing global clamor for the U.S. to surrender its principled stand on the private ownership of firearms.
Right now, the U.N. is negotiating an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), aiming to have it ready for signature before the November 2012 presidential election in the United States. The push for the ATT received a significant boost at an October 3, 2005, meeting in Luxembourg where foreign ministers of the European Union “backed demands for a new international treaty on the arms trade to outlaw small arms,” according to an article in Defense News.9 Proposed by Great Britain’s foreign secretary Jack Straw, the statement was greeted gleefully by global gun-ban groups. Simon Grey, the arms control campaign manager at the NGO Oxfam, “hailed the decision as a ‘massive step toward stricter’ controls on firearms.”
That same month, a hemisphere away, in our own nation’s capital, the Organization of American States (OAS) held a two-day meeting “aimed at developing steps to prevent and combat illicit arms trafficking in the Western Hemisphere,” according to a press release from our very own Department of State.10 The assistant secretary-general of the OAS called the arms trade a “transnational scourge,” and said its effect on society “ranks among the most disastrous criminal activities against humankind.” The meeting was led by a delegate from Colombia and held in accordance with the OAS “Inter-American Convention against the Illicit Manufacturing and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives, and Other Related Materials.” In the press release, the Colombian delegate called the convention “‘groundbreaking and unique’ as it is the first binding legal agreement on this issue.”
Wait a minute. Isn’t this the same “legally binding” concept we’re fighting at the U.N.? And why did you never hear about the Senate approving this treaty?
Because it never has. The OAS treaty was first proposed in 1998, during the Clinton years. Since then, the career State Department bureaucrats, and President Obama, have pushed for Senate ratification of the proposed OAS treaty, but the Foreign Relations Committee has never taken it up.
The bureaucrats are surely proud of their work. In the press release, they stated that “the entry into force in 1998 of the Inter-American convention against illicit arms trafficking made the OAS a leader in multilateral efforts to address the problem of illicit weapons trafficking.”11 How did the “entry into force” happen without Senate ratification? The press release states, “The United States is a signatory to the convention and supports efforts to ‘aggressively’ implement its provisions.”
So now we have treaties that are supposedly applicable to the U.S. without Senate ratification, merely because the president signed them.
So much for checks and balances.
The clash of competing visions is not limited to the United States versus the global gun-ban groups. In the midst are career bureaucrats, both here and abroad, whose jobs depend on negotiating agreements, not making principled stands. They are pushing forward on multiple fronts, out of the public eye, and seemingly without supervision.
This is their business, and we are newcomers to the process, vastly outnumbered by their legions. They are operating in venues that didn’t even exist a few years ago. They are supported by the global media and reinforced by the work of paid NGO staffers who are dedicated solely to moving a global gun ban forward. We are vastly underfunded compared to the billions of dollars received by NGOs in “international aid and development” grants used to promote gun prohibition, some of which originate in our very own tax coffers. There are times when I wonder whether it’s even possible to beat them at their own game.
But then I am reminded that this debate is not about process, policy, or global politics. At its core, this debate is about people, and the value we place on freedom.
Another development in October 2005 reminded me of freedom’s enduring appeal. Social engineers in Brazil placed a binding gun-ban referendum on the national ballot for the October 23 elections. With majority support, the ballot question would completely outlaw the sale of firearms and ammunition to private citizens. Rebecca Peters awaited the results of the vote on the edge of her seat, telling the Nation, “If it passes, the referendum will show other countries that the gun lobby can be beaten. If that happens, we believe campaigns will arise in other countries, in Latin American and elsewhere, for a moratorium, or for serious restrictions, on the proliferation of guns.”12 There’s their favorite word for “ban” again, “moratorium.” And now she’s talking about “serious” restrictions, not just the “moderate” ones she outlined in our debate. No wonder she was so excited at the prospect of a national vote in Brazil to ban guns.
On the day of the vote, voters stood in long lines to cast their ballots—voting is mandatory in Brazil, with failure punishable by a fine. Political observers predicted the ban would pass by a landslide. At the end of the day, however, the referendum was rejected by a vote of nearly 65 percent. Freedom’s enduring appeal had triumphed again.
But not for long.
Despite all the pundits who said the referendum would set a global precedent, Brazil’s gun-ban groups vowed to try again. The vaunted “will of the people” only seems to count when the people agree with the gun-ban agenda. “This closes the issue now, but maybe the next generation will be able to have this discussion again,” said a local leader of the gun-ban campaign. “I hope the whole world will be able to deal with this again.”13
The whole world will certainly deal with it again, and freedom will face its fiercest challenge yet, from the concerted forces of the global gun-ban corps who have spent the years since 2001 gearing up for more attempts to destroy the freedoms that are as American as apple pie.
The chapters that follow will confirm the stakes of this epic battle. And they will illustrate how critical it is for every freedom-loving American to join this battle and work together to ensure that freedom prevails again.
The U.N., which recently celebrated its sixty-fifth anniversary, was founded with the highest hopes to promote peace among the world’s nations and human rights for the world’s peoples. Yet when it comes to both its peacekeeping and human-rights missions, the U.N. has proven itself utterly bankrupt. For example, the U.N.’s so-called Human Rights Council includes some of the worst human rights violators in the world, such as Cuba, Libya, and Saudi Arabia.
Add to this the almost daily reports in the media of U.N. corruption, including what can only be described as a “culture of rape” among U.N. “peacekeepers” around the world. Decent men and women, not only in America but worldwide, must vigorously oppose U.N. attempts to disarm civilian populations—especially those in dire need of the tools for self-defense.
Not long after the United Nations was founded, Sir Winston Churchill offered the following about the new world body: “We must make sure that its work is fruitful, that it is a reality and not a sham, that it is a true temple of peace in which the shields of many nations can some day be hung up, and not merely a cockpit in a Tower of Babel.”14
When this great leader said “we,” he was really speaking of you and me. What would he say today?
Global Repression: The International Gun Control Movement
Stymied by the outcome of elections in the United States—solidifying pro–Second Amendment majorities in the U.S. House and Senate— the gun-prohibition lobby turned to the courts, filing meritless suits against gun manufacturers with the hope of imposing prohibition through industry bankruptcy. As the lawsuit strategy fell apart, gun-prohibition groups sought victory through international law. Under their new strategy, the further the locus of decision making moved from democratic, American control, the better the chances for success in achieving universal disarmament through an international, U.N.-backed treaty.
Rebecca Peters
Until July 2010, billionaire George Soros’s protégé Rebecca Peters ran the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), which coordinates the gun prohibition efforts of groups around the world, including the Brady Campaign in America. (As of September 2010, the IANSA website has not revealed a new “Director,” and there is no indication from IANSA that its future efforts will not continue in Peters’s extremist path.) IANSA claims more than eight hundred accomplice groups worldwide and is funded with countless millions from governments, international foundations, and billionaires such as Soros. In spreading its dangerous doctrine of civil disarmament, IANSA receives the patronage of the same governments that push gun prohibition at the U.N. In effect, IANSA is the cutting-edge public relations arm of the U.N.’s gun prohibition campaign.
When I debated Peters at King’s College in London on October 12, 2004, she was very forthright in saying that the gun prohibition movement was aimed squarely at Americans: “Americans are people like everyone else on Earth. They should abide by the same rules as everyone else.”1
Peters would deny firearms, the proven means of self-defense to resist tyrants and genocide, to good citizens worldwide: “It’s not going to be up to each individual person to be like a hero in a movie defending against this threat to freedom.”2
At the debate, I reminded the audience of NRA’s public awareness campaign, which asked: “Would you shoot a rapist before he slit your throat?” She responded by denying even rape victims the right to defend themselves against violent attack: “Women need to be protected by police forces, by judiciaries, by criminal justice systems. People who have guns for self-defense are not safer than people who don’t . . . having a gun in that situation escalates the problem.”3
When Peters claimed that all she wanted was “moderate” gun control, I repeated her mantra, in which she advocates banning every hunting rifle and works toward eliminating firearms of any kind:
Your definition of “moderate” is the most extreme definition imaginable. From your own words, here you are in a CNN interview in October 2003. You want to ban every rifle that can shoot over 100 meters. That’s basically a football field for people back in the U.S. That’s every hunting rifle in the United States. The founding document of IANSA, your very own organization says, and I quote, “Reduce the availability of weapons to civilians in all societies.” Duck hunters . . . in Australia. Taking away their pump shotguns. Here’s your ad, and I can give you all these NGOs you work with. Pamphlet after pamphlet after pamphlet, I can stack them to the ceiling, where you call for no [right] to individual armament. So let’s be honest. You want to take guns away from all people, a global bureaucracy to do it. We’re not going to let it happen.4
The moderator asked her, “So is that true?” She answered honestly: “We want to see a drastic reduction in gun ownership across the world. Yes. We want to see much lower proliferation of guns among the civilian population, and also among governments . . . Yeah, we want to reduce the number of guns in circulation around the world.”5
Her “moderate” gun-ban plan includes more than just banning every hunting rifle. She and IANSA want to ban every semiautomatic shotgun, every semiautomatic rifle, and every single handgun:
Moderator: Do you believe, as you said in the past, that semiautomatic rifles and shotguns have no legitimate role in civilian hands?
Rebecca Peters: Yes, I do. Semiautomatic weapons are designed to kill large numbers of people. They were designed for military use. Many people have bought them for other purposes, for example, for hunting because they’ve been available. But there’s no justification for semiautomatic weapons to be owned by members of the civilian population. Yes, I believe that semiautomatic rifles and shotguns have no legitimate role in civilian hands. And not only that; handguns have no legitimate role in civilian hands.6
Her long-term objective is a worldwide gun ban, which would be enforced against the U.S. In her generosity, she would allow selected Americans to prove that they need a single-shot rifle—with a range of fewer than 100 meters—for hunting:
I think American citizens should not be exempt from the rules that apply to the rest of the world. At the moment there are no rules applying to the rest of the world. That’s what we’re working for. American citizens should have guns that are suitable for the legitimate purposes that they can prove. I think that eventually Americans will realize that their obsession with arming themselves in fear, in a paranoid belief that they’re going to be able to stave off the ills of the world through owning guns, through turning every house into an arsenal, eventually Americans will go away from that. I think Americans who hunt—and who prove that they can hunt—should have single-shot rifles suitable for hunting whatever they’re hunting. I mean American citizens should be like any other citizens of the world.7
Peters extolled a decree she would impose on the U.S., already in effect in Australia and Great Britain: prohibition of defensive gun ownership. In those countries, she proclaims, “You were not allowed to have guns for self-defense. If you had a gun for self-defense, you were breaking the law.”8
Peters shares that worldview with Neil Arya, who formerly headed Physicians for Global Survival in Canada. He told the U.N. in 2001 that physicians do not care whether firearms are involved in incidents where the shooter was a gangster, a soldier, or a law-abiding gun owner. In this perverse view, no distinction exists between an armed criminal murdering a robbery victim, an innocent victim saving her life by shooting the violent felon, a Nazi soldier shooting a Jew, or an American soldier shooting a Nazi soldier.9 Yet it’s a view espoused by the U.N., which is run by dictatorships that practice genocide, rape, kidnapping, and slavery around the world. And this is the bankrupt organization that Peters believes should impose its “culture” on the U.S. During our debate, when the question was posed, “Why do you place such unquestioning trust in governments and the United Nations, when you clearly do not trust individuals for the best way to protect themselves and their families?” she replied:
It’s called civilization. Individuals come together. They form societies. They form governments. That’s part of the contract that we make. It’s a long time gone now since Thomas Hobbes described society as being characterised by a continual fear and danger of violent death and the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. I have confidence that people coming together into countries are going to operate better than a whole lot of individuals making up their own rules, taking the law into their own hands.10
In other words, the dictatorial governments of Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Syria, and China should be empowered to mandate whether peaceful citizens may defend themselves against violence. Exercising the God-given right to protect oneself would no longer exist.
To fully understand the danger the global enemies of freedom pose to our Second Amendment, Americans must understand the ever-shifting vocabulary and bizarre legal theories masking the endgame of the international gun-ban movement.
For the true, sinister meaning of benign-sounding phrases such as “gun control,” or “gun law reform,” or “sensible firearms regulation,” or “violence prevention”—the phony, deceptive vocabulary of the international gun-ban crowd—look no further than the mind of Rebecca Peters and her allies. Their ideology—wherever it is applied—is deadly to freedom.
With IANSA and Peters, there are no words or phrases that mean what average world citizens might naturally construe. They live in the murky sea of newspeak of their own invention—IANSA-speak, if you will.
Their doctrine is based on a concept of collective punishment or a kind of neo-Marxist redistribution—where guilt is transferred from evildoers, criminals, or mass killers, to be assigned to the innocent masses—law-abiding gun owners. In applying this twisted view on a global scale, their goal is to implement total civil disarmament through the U.N., either by an overriding binding treaty or piecemeal, one country at a time, outlawing and confiscating whole classes of firearms.
To understand what Peters has been pushing for on the world scale— what is intended for firearms owners in every nation—those working to protect freedom must study her past to define her words and actions today. The nightmare for peaceable gun owners in Australia is a glimpse into the future for those who are not vigilant and strong. As the proclaimed architect of the 1996–97 long-gun confiscation in Australia,11 Peters saw law-abiding firearms owners forfeit more than seven hundred thousand rifles and shotguns for destruction under the guise of what she and the government called a “buyback.”12 The confiscation scheme, which Peters said “is the world’s biggest,”13 is the seminal example of gun control. And gun control shouldn’t be about punishing criminals. “There is in America,” she sniffed, “a very entrenched idea that the purpose of gun laws is to punish bad guys.”14
Australia, Peters has often said, is the standard for the rest of what she calls “civil society”—meaning, a society without gun ownership. She always refers to the seven hundred thousand confiscated and destroyed rifles and shotguns banned in Australia as “inherently dangerous” “weapons of war,” as “battlefield weapons,” or as “military style-weapons,” and the media always obliges by adopting her IANSA-speak.15
But the semiauto and pump shotguns and the self-loading rifles she marks as being “inherently dangerous” were almost all ordinary sporting arms. The official government forfeiture list included all semiauto .22s, including the Ruger 10/22, Winchester Model 1905, and Remington Nylon 66. As for shotguns and center-fire rifles, the list included the Winchester Model 12, Remington 870, Mossberg 500, Browning Auto-5, Remingtons 1100 and 11-87, Remingtons 740 and 7400, and the Winchester Model 100.16 Think of any semiauto sporting long gun and any pump shotgun; whatever the make, those firearms became contraband under Peters’s “weapons of war” big lie.
The collected words of Rebecca Peters and IANSA resemble a Shakespearean aside; they say one thing to the other actors on the stage, then something else past the back of their hands to be heard by their agreeable global partners. For example, at our King’s College debate, Peters mocked the use of the term “gun confiscation.” She claimed that “the gun lobby has very much overstated . . . confiscation, which seems to be the preoccupation of the gun lobby. There has [sic] not been mass confiscation programs.”17 Apparently, in IANSA-speak, the Australian government’s seizure of seven hundred thousand sporting long guns from law-abiding citizens was not “mass confiscation.”
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